Friday, September 20, 2013

This
session was held in Thommo and Geetha’s home with wonderful snacks to leaven
the proceedings. As usual the potpourri of poets came from several parts of the
world: Lebanon, UK, India, Turkey, and Ireland.

Priya, & Esther

The
death of Seamus Heaney on Aug 30, 2013 prompted two readers to reach for his
verse. Limericks made a comeback once again, and some quite recent examples are
included.

Talitha

A
major upcoming anniversary is to be celebrated, Shakespeare’s 450th birth
anniversary on April 23, 2014, with recitations from his plays and sonnets, and
music from the songs.

We
were meeting in Thommo’s place because the Library at the CYC was being used
during renovation elsewhere in the club. The wonderful result was Geetha served
us coffee and bondas with McVities
biscuits. We are glad to know that Geetha is no longer unnerved by the KRG
group, and she may join us even while continuing with her teaching at Choice School
for two more years.

We
decided to have a celebration of Shakespeare’s 450th birth anniversary (April
23, 2014). The last such celebration we had was in 2009 when Talitha organised ‘Shakescene’:

You
will recall the KRG Elizabethan Singers rendered three beautiful songs from
Shakespeare’s plays and a sonnet set to tune by Thommo. We need a keyboard
player; Esther volunteered and Joe said this talent makes her a precious member
of our group.

The
dates for the remaining sessions of the year are agreed as follows:

Fri Oct 11,
2013Emma by Jane Austen

Fri Nov 8,
2013Poetry

Thu Dec 12,
2013The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar
Wilde

Our
next reading will be at the CYC and although Joe & KumKum will miss the Oct
and Nov sessions on account of their trip to USA, Joe promised to send sound
files as a stand-in for attendance, if Priya will play them on her computer to
the reading group. Priya agreed. She will be the convenor for the next two
sessions. Once Priya was asked by the Manager at CYC, it seems, what we all do
in the library when we meet. Do we read the library books? And why is the
discussion so animated? Should the Club provide curtains for the group to veil
their raucous rumblings?

Thommo
said he had been urging CYC for a long time to begin a library. At the Cochin
Club in Fort Kochi, the library was inaugurated by buying wholesale the library
of the Quilon Club (a planters’ club of Harrison’s Malayalam company) when that
closed down.

Joe,
KumKum, Mathew & Priya are following the online Modern Poetry course
offered free by Univ of Pennsylvania through Coursera:

Lewis
Carroll’s humorous verse from Through the Looking Glass was read by Talitha. It
is a great piece of mock-ironic humour with many famous lines such as this:

No
birds were flying overhead –

There were no birds to fly

(a
kind of post-Armageddon scene, said Talitha).

Perhaps
the most famous quote from here is:

"The
time has come," the Walrus said,

"To talk of many things:

Of
shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--

Of cabbages--and kings--

And
why the sea is boiling hot--

And whether pigs have wings."

Joe
said this poem was a great favourite of his children who’d stay rapt when he
read it out to them at ages 5 and 6.

So
too the lines:

‘I
weep for you the Walrus said,

‘I deeply sympathise.’

With
sobs and tears he sorted out

Those of largest size,

Talitha
used a book by Derek O’Brien, Speak Up,
Speak Out : My Favourite Elocution Pieces and How to Deliver Them. This
elicited some information on his father Neill O’Brien, erstwhile chief of
Oxford University Press in India, and representative for Anglo Indians. He
taught English at St. Xavier’s College, College, when Joe was there. His mother
was a Bengali. Derek, his son, has a media company, Derek O’Brien Associates,
and was a one-time quizmaster on TV and is now Trinamul Congress MP.

Tagore
was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature on Sept 10, 1913, a hundred years
ago. He was the first Asian to get the prize. In an unusual gesture, this year,
the Swedish Govt, jointly with the Indian Govt celebrated the occasion through
various cultural events in both the countries.

KumKum
thought of presenting Tagore to KRG Readers once again, but this time as a
story teller in Verse. Tagore wrote many long poems which are actually one-act
plays with different characters saying their parts.

Some
of these he took from the Mahabharata, Ramayana, and Folk tales from different
parts of India; some were from religious texts, and some others were his
inventions.

The
one she read is titled Karna-Kunti Sangbad from Rabindranath's book Kahani.
Itis a well-known story from the Mahabharata. A day before Karna was to
face Arjuna in the war, the worried mother, Kunti, meets Karna alone, and tries
to entice him away to the side of the Pandavas. She tells him the truth of his
birth and that she, Kunti, is his real mother. But, Karna remains steadfast.

The
poem in Bengali is one of Rabindranath's best in this genre. Ketaki Kushari
Dyson, poet, author, and an accomplished translator of Tagore's works, has done
a superb job in her translation of the poem, which Joe nevertheless has
tinkered with. These are excerpts of the poem taken from KKD’s book of
translations, iwon't let you go:

Talitha
mentioned that Karna had been disadvantaged earlier in the Mahabharata in seeking the hand of Draupadi, on account of his
humble birth. But here he is revealed as being of noble lineage, unknown to
him. At the end of the war Kunti will have five sons, for either Arjuna or
Karna will die. Krishna played foul and disabled a weapon of Karna and he was
killed while attempting to lift his chariot out of a rut. Here from the
Wikipedia entry:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karna

“Karna
was the son of Surya (a solar deity) and Kunti. He was born to Kunti before her
marriage with Pandu. Karna was the closest friend of Duryodhana and fought on
his behalf against the Pandavas (his brothers) in the famous Kurukshetra war.
Karna fought against misfortune throughout his life and kept his word under all
circumstances. Many admire him for his courage and generosity. It is believed
that Karna founded the city of Karnal.

Many
believe that he was the greatest warrior of Mahabharata since he was only able
to be defeated by Arjuna along with a combination of 3 curses, Indra's efforts
and Kunti's request.”

Joe
wondered whether this English version from the Bengali of Rabindranath,
abridged by KumKum to shorten the long poem, could be considered a translation
of a translation, since the original story must have been in Sanskrit.

The
talk turned to the Gitanjali as a translation, which Talitha said was not done
by Rabindranath. A critique of that is here by Joe:

Tagore could not
resist the urge to simplify when he translated some of his poems into English.
The Gitanjali translation, which he made himself first and then got some help
from WB Yeats in redaction, is taken by modern critics as an example of the
disservice he did himself as a poet. To quote Fr Pierre Fallon (a Jesuit who
taught Comparative Literature in Jadavpur University when I was in college at
St Xavier's): “The Western Gitanjali loses much of the musical beauty and evocative
power of the original poems.” Yet he calls it a 'jewel' in the category of
English religious poetry.

Priya
said you can get many Bengali channels on TataSky dish network by paying Rs
35/- per month extra over the basic charge. Everyone lamented that WorldSpace radio
became defunct some years back. Another site, said Sunil, is the Internet radio
site TuneIn:

Seamus
Heaney has 12 collections from Death of a Naturalist (1966), to Human
Chain (2010), his last representing mostly ruminations on the end of life
after his stroke in 2006. He won many prizes: the Forward (2010), T.S. Eliot (
2006) for the collection District and
Circle, Whitbread (1996) for his translation of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, and the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1995; "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which
exalt everyday miracles and the living past", in the words of the Nobel
citation.

He taught for a while at Harvard for several years
(one semester a year), and was at Oxford as Professor of Poetry, and Queen’s
College. Born in Northern Ireland, he was a Catholic and nationalist who chose
to live in the South. He once wrote this in protest when he was classified as
‘British’ poet in an anthology published in England:

Be advised, my passport's green
No glass of ours was ever raised
To toast the Queen.

Born in farm country in N Ireland in Bellaghy in
Londonderry County, he was the eldest of many children, the clever one who got
a scholarship and made it to Queens University in Belfast (St. Columb’s
College). He never forgot his country origins and made great use of farm
imagery and rural situations in his poetry. In this respect he was like Ted
Hughes whom he greatly admired. He was a writer of great distinction on poetry
with published volumes of his lectures and in the volume of literary criticism Finders/Keepers his prose shows his wide
reading and great discernment.

One of his famous poems is the first one in his
first collection in 1966, called Digging.
After an admiring description of his father digging in the field, it ends:

But I've no spade to follow men like them.Between my finger and my thumbThe squat pen rests.I'll dig with it.

He became a full-time poet and writer in 1972 and
gave up his teaching career when he realised he had found his unique voice in a
career as poet. One of the sad events of his boyhood was when a younger brother
was killed in an accident. He transformed this into a poem called Mid-term
Break.

He
was troubled by the sectarian violence in N Ireland, deploring the terrorism
and the need to take sides. He used his poetry to state the painful truth he
saw. Frank McGuinness, the Irish playwright, said: "During the darkest
days of the conflict he was our conscience: a conscience that was accurate and
precise in how it articulated what was happening.”

He
was a man greatly loved for his personal kindness and courtesy, and for his
encouragement of younger poets. He magically retrieved a love poem from his
stroke incident in 2006, when his wife, Marie, drove with him in the ambulance.
He confesses he was scared at being taken to hospital, grief-stricken at being
helpless, and a bit weepy. He suddenly felt a rush of love which came out in
the poem called Chanson d'Aventure:

There
are a couple of more poems Joe read.

Talitha
referred to pome Miracle where the
question is posed whether it is a religious poem or a secular one, since
Heaney, though raised a Catholic, ceased to observe the religion in worship.
The poem draws attention to the faith of the attendants who let down a
paralytic man through the roof into the presence of Jesus, seeking a cure. In a
similar vein is the story of the woman with an ‘issue of blood’ who is cured
when she touches the hem of the garment worn by Jesus.

Priya

Heaney
was the poet she too chose; he died recently on Aug 30 at the age of 74. The
first one, Blackberry-Picking,is a sensuous
description of the act of picking the berries and its transformation in the
hands of those who handle it and eat it. Blackberries can become erotic subjects
in the hands of a poet such as Heaney.
Bluebeard (palms sticky as
Bluebeard's) is the person of whom wives inquire about the fatal private
room in the house at their peril. Priya said Yeats died in 1939, when Heaney was
born. Talitha quipped that since Joe also was born in 1939 (as he confessed
earlier), ‘who knows on whom the mantle has fallen.’ KumKum noted that she
would have been fed up when Joe retired from his academic career, had he not shown
this other inclination toward literature and poetry.

The second poem Priya read was titled Requiem for the Croppies. Here’s an explanation:

The croppies were called such because they wore their hair
cropped—to oppose the foppish, long-hair favoured by the aristocracy of the
time. They did carry barley in their
pockets. And, on June 21, 1798 at Vinegar Hill, they were cornered and many
were slaughtered by artillery bombardment.
They made two futile attempts to break the British line. The British
buried the bodies in mass, shallow graves—but the seeds of rebellion were
sown—and bore fruit when the barley in their pockets came up–nourished by their
own bodies–and bore fruit again in, 1913, 1916, 1969 and beyond—whenever the
revolutionary spirit could not be killed.

He
was the first modern Turkish poet, and grew up when Kemal Ataturk took charge
of Turkey. There is a movement to bring back his bones from Greece to Turkey
now. Thommo noted that in Turkish the normal Muslim names spelled with ‘a’ are
replaced by ‘e’. The conversation digressed to the Syrian civil war afoot, and
America’s itching to bomb and intervene. There is nothing so favoured as
instability in the Middle East by the big powers, all keen to have first
options on the oil wealth there.

Faces of Our Women
is a lovely poem celebrating women, and it won KumKum’s heart. Afterwards the
conversation turned to the recent controversy over a Miss America winner of
India extraction, whose dusky complexion came in for the usual Twitter abuse.
Everyone was disgusted at the continuing Indian ideals of beauty that value
fair skin. The stupid ads fronted by Shah Rukh Khan advertising ‘Fair and
Lovely’ cream for Rs 10/- was an example held up to ridicule. Think of the late
Smita Patil, think of Nandita Das.

Talitha
said although Malayalis are no less enamoured of fair-skinned women, Malayali
poets do not denigrate the woman called ‘karutha
penna,’ dark lady. Thommo mentioned his father having been so fair that
when he went to the Customs to take delivery of a foreign car (Plymouth Fury) imported
for the use of his white boss in Dunlop, he was saluted and addressed as the
white man.

Priya
said the complexion demanded in Bihar for brides is either ‘cream and peach’ or
‘milky white.’

The
first poem, Hiroshima Child, has been
translated well according to Talitha. Joe was reminded of the darkest poem in
Vikram Seth's The Collected Poems, on
p.169. It is about the fateful day on Aug 6, 1945 when Hiroshima was reduced to
vaporous rubble by an atom bomb. It is titled A Doctor’s Journal Entry for August 6, 1945. There is no way of
excerpting from this long 64-line poem in couplets, for it unfolds one
continuous scene of desolation. The doctor tries to cope, and realises, one by
one, the calamitous effects on him, and on the other citizens of that single
blinding flash. We are brought face to face with the horror and degradation
visited on people by nuclear explosions. Seth has researched and read the
eye-witness accounts of the atomic blast and captures them in all their stark
horror.

Esther

Jerry Pinto (1966 –

Her
choice was Jerry Pinto, the Goan writer who lives and works in Mumbai. He won
the Hindu Lit for Life prize last year for his book Em and the Big Hoom. It took a decade or more in the writing. You
can read his bio at:

He
has worked at many jobs in his life. An earlier book of his Helen, the H-Bomb on the cabaret artiste
Helen of Hindi movies won a prize for film books. Jerry Pinto calls himself a
poet first and has published two volumes of poetry. His mother was bipolar and
suffered the alternating mood swings that characterise the disease. The first
poem Esther read, Bedside, speaks of
the son nursing the mother. These lines are quite striking:

I
have survived to write these lines

To
turn you, baste you and marinate

Our
twinned lives into a poem.

The
son is devastated that he could not hold on to his mother the way he wanted. These
lines knell his lasting regret:

Mummy,
find it in you to forgive me

And
I will try to be bigger than my guilt

And
forgive myself.

Geetha

Kahlil Gibran (1883 – 1931)

She
chose Kahlil Gibran. Geetha found The
Song of the Rain a lovely poem with imagery:

I
emerge from the heard of the sea

Soar
with the breeze. When I see a field in

Need,
I descend and embrace the flowers and

The
trees in a million little ways.

This
year Thommo said there is a worry about the crop in Kerala on account of
continuous rain. In his 32 years residing here he cannot recall such a lashing
of rain, almost every day since June 1, 2013.

Thommo
indicated he was going to bring down the literary altitude of the reading group
by dealing in Limericks. Not at all, said Joe, who enjoys limericks and uses
them to twit friends and relatives, or sometimes to greet them. Here’s one of
his recent efforts:

And yet all this comes down when the job’s done
Showing off walls of sure and solid stone.

So if, my dear, there sometimes seem to be
Old bridges breaking between you and me

Never fear. We may let the scaffolds fall
Confident that we have built our wall.

5. Miracle
Not the one who takes up his bed and walks
But the ones who have known him all along
And carry him in –

Their shoulders numb,
the ache and stoop deeplocked
In their backs, the stretcher handles
Slippery with sweat. And no let‐up

Until he’s strapped
on tight, made tiltable
And raised to the tiled roof, then lowered for healing.
Be mindful of them as they stand and wait

For the burn of the
paid‐out ropes to cool,
Their slight lightheadedness and incredulity
To pass, those ones who had known him all along.

[Written
after his heart attack in 2006, from which he took a year to recover; Heaney is
not a religious person. ‘Miracle’ uses the Biblical story of Jesus healing the
paralysed man (Mark 2, 1‐12) to refer to the poet’s own recovery from a stroke.
Is this a religious or a secular poem?]

Priya

poems by Seamus Heaney

Blackberry-Picking

Late August, given heavy rain and sun

For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.

At first, just one, a glossy purple clot

Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.

You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet

Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it

Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for

Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger

Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots

Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.

Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills

We trekked and picked until the cans were full

Until the tinkling bottom had been covered

With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned

Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered

With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.

We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.

But when the bath was filled we found a fur,

A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.

The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush

The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.

I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair

That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.

Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.

Requiem for the
Croppies

The pockets of our greatcoats full of barley...

No kitchens on the run, no striking camp...

We moved quick and sudden in our own country.

The priest lay behind ditches with the tramp.

A people hardly marching... on the hike...

We found new tactics happening each day:

We'd cut through reins and rider with the pike

And stampede cattle into infantry,

Then retreat through hedges where cavalry must be thrown.

Until... on Vinegar Hill... the final conclave.

Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon.

The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.

They buried us without shroud or coffin

And in August... the barley grew up out of our grave.

Death Of A Naturalist

All
year the flax-dam festered in the heart

Of
the townland; green and heavy headed

Flax
had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.

Daily
it sweltered in the punishing sun.

Bubbles
gargled delicately, bluebottles

Wove
a strong gauze of sound around the smell.

There
were dragon-flies, spotted butterflies,

But
best of all was the warm thick slobber

Of
frogspawn that grew like clotted water

In
the shade of the banks. Here, every spring

I
would fill jampotfuls of the jellied

Specks
to range on window-sills at home,

On
shelves at school, and wait and watch until

The
fattening dots burst into nimble-

Swimming
tadpoles. Miss Walls would tell us how

The
daddy frog was called a bullfrog

And
how he croaked and how the mammy frog

Laid
hundreds of little eggs and this was

Frogspawn.
You could tell the weather by frogs too

For
they were yellow in the sun and brown

In
rain.

Then
one hot day when fields were rank

With
cowdung in the grass the angry frogs

Invaded
the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges

To
a coarse croaking that I had not heard

Before.
The air was thick with a bass chorus.

Right
down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cocked

On
sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:

The
slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat

Poised
like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.

I
sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings

Were
gathered there for vengeance and I knew

That
if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.

Sunil poems by Nazim Hikmet (1902-1963, Turkey)

Hiroshima Child

I come and stand at every door

But none can hear my silent tread

I knock and yet remain unseen

For I am dead for I am dead

I'm only seven though I died

In Hiroshima long ago

I'm seven now as I was then

When children die they do not grow

My hair was scorched by swirling flame

My eyes grew dim my eyes grew blind

Death came and turned my bones to dust

And that was scattered by the wind

I need no fruit I need no rice

I need no sweets nor even bread

I ask for nothing for myself

For I am dead for I am dead

All that I need is that for peace

You fight today you fight today

So that the children of this world

Can live and grow and laugh and play

The Faces Of Our
Women

Mary didn't give birth to God.

Mary isn't the mother of God.

Mary is one mother among many mothers.

Mary gave birth to a son,

a son among many sons.

That's why Mary is so beautiful in all the pictures of her.

That's why Mary's son is so close to us, like our own sons.

The faces of our women are the book of our pains.

Our pains, our faults and the blood we shed

carve scars on the faces of our women like plows.

And our joys are reflected in the eyes of women

like the dawns glowing on the lakes.

Our imaginations are on the faces of women we love.

Whether we see them or not, they are before us,

closest to our realities and furthest.

Esther

poems by Jerry Pinto

Bedside

I
watch your face hanging open

Your
warm wet mouth, your tongue flickering

Your
spectacles grimy, your hair alive

Your
forehead broad and wasted

Your
cheeks alternately limp and bulging.

I
do not need to watch your body

I
have tended it often

Eased
its pains with capsicum plasters

And
prayed I was easing your mind too

With
my litany fresh off the shelf:

Tegretol,
Anxol, Espazine, Hexidol

Neurobion,
Arrovit, Shelcal, Diazepam.

I
cross your palm with powder

And
pray, entire rosaries and masses,

satsangs
and majlises, that you should not

Tell
my future.

When
I last lifted you off the floor

You
were sitting close to my bed.

You
did not expect to fall

Not
under the knowing eyes of

Mother
of Perpetual Succour.

I
direct your gaze to the falling slipper

Of
the child in her arms.

It
falls, you told me some lives ago

Out
of fear of the foretold future

I
understand that slippage

But
you? You live it.

Some
nights you let me sleep in patches

I
have grown used to it, relying on my

Ability
to turn you off, and your pain.

I
have survived to write these lines

To
turn you, baste you and marinate

Our
twinned lives into a poem.

But
I wish I could keep

My
heart unguilty, my love fresh

My
thoughts wide-ranging, my eyes new

and
that wound — inflicted on days of empathy —

raw
and open.

What
happened to the in-betweens?

The
Erle Stanley Gardners and the Agathas?

The
monotonous card games and the inedible food?

The
forced Vicks-ings and the rage of Tiger balm?

Did
we take them away

With
our conscientious powder formulae?

There
are many options I know

The
glaze of stillness and the panacea of

forgetfulness

Or
the black snot that stained granny’s kerchief

A
trust in the occult, born of grief.

A
faith in God, born of habit.

So
many options and I, on auto-pilot

Cross
your palm with powder.

Outside,
I turn my face to the sun

Laugh,
play, pun, work, entertain, function.

I
know from a few grim examples

And
one bright shining one

How
the world fetes facades.

I
have grown used to seeing the one I devised

Reflected
in your laughter-silted eyes.

Inside,
I shrink from metaphor and magic

I
have no beliefs here, only a watchfulness.

My
world condenses into an ink-stain

As
your voice trails after me from room to room.

I
made promises for you, standing in the toilet

By
the skull of the Cyclops that drank my piss

I
broke those promises, one by one

And
know that is why I cannot love.

Mummy,
find it in you to forgive me

And
I will try to be bigger than my guilt

And
forgive myself.

Drawing Home

Were
I to draw my home, I don’t think

I
would do it quite like this drawing of yours.

All
these right angles and hinges bear no resemblance

To
my memories of suddenness and curves, odd shapes

And
our balancing act: four on a trapeze.

Still
I don’t resent your drawing.

I
rather like it, in fact; this way of making coherent

Scenes
of such randomness.

You
could play one camera. I could be the other.

We
could ask for a neutral third so that

Between
the three of us, we’d miss nothing.

You
could look for the big picture and I

For
nuance. The third camera, full-frontal, unblinking

Could
mediate. We might arrive at something

Between
your version and mine.

Geetha

poem by Khalil Gibran

Song Of The Rain VII

I
am dotted silver threads dropped from heaven

By
the gods. Nature then takes me, to adorn

Her
fields and valleys.

I
am beautiful pearls, plucked from the

Crown
of Ishtar by the daughter of Dawn

To
embellish the gardens.

When
I cry the hills laugh;

When
I humble myself the flowers rejoice;

When
I bow, all things are elated.

The
field and the cloud are lovers

And
between them I am a messenger of mercy.

I
quench the thirst of one;

I
cure the ailment of the other.

The
voice of thunder declares my arrival;

The
rainbow announces my departure.

I
am like earthly life, which begins at

The
feet of the mad elements and ends

Under
the upraised wings of death.

I
emerge from the heard of the sea

Soar
with the breeze. When I see a field in

Need,
I descend and embrace the flowers and

The
trees in a million little ways.

I
touch gently at the windows with my

Soft
fingers, and my announcement is a

Welcome
song. All can hear, but only

The
sensitive can understand.

The
heat in the air gives birth to me,

But
in turn I kill it,

As
woman overcomes man with

The
strength she takes from him.

I
am the sigh of the sea;

The
laughter of the field;

The
tears of heaven.

So
with love -

Sighs
from the deep sea of affection;

Laughter
from the colorful field of the spirit;

Tears
from the endless heaven of memories.

Thommo

Limericks

There was an Old Man on whose nose
Most birds of the air could repose;
But they all flew away at the closing of day,
Which relieved that Old Man and his nose.

(Edward Lear)

A clergyman told from his text

How Samson was barbered and vexed,

And told it so true

That a man in the pew

Got rattled, and shouted out 'Next!"

Brigham
Young was never a neuter,

A
pansy or fairy or fruiter.

Where
ten thousand virgins

Succumbed
to his urgin’s,

We
now have the great state of Utah.

(Anon)

A
visitor once to Loch Ness

Met
the monster, which left him a mess.

They
returned his entrails

By
the regular mails

And
the rest of the stuff by express

There
was an old man from Bicester,

Walking
one day with his sister,

When
a bull with one poke

Tossed
her into an oak,

And
the silly old bloke never missed her.

-
Anon

A
French poodle espied in the hall

A
pool that a damp gamp let fall,

And
said, “Ah, oui, oui!

“This
time it’s not me,

“But
I’m bound to be blamed for it all.”

-
Anon

There
was a young fellow named Fisher

Who
was fishing for fish in a fissure,

When
a cod, with a grin,

Pulled
the fisherman in—

Now
they’re fishing the fissure for Fisher.

(Anon)

There
was a young lady of Kent,

Who
always said just what she meant.

People
said, “She’s a dear,

“So
unique, so sincere.”

But
they shunned her by common consent.

-
Anon

Cried
a slender young lady called Toni

With
a bottom exceedingly bony

"I'll
say this for my rump

Though
it may not be plump

It's
my own, not a silicone phoney!"

I
sat next to the Duchess at tea;

It
was just as I feared it would be.

Her
rumblings abdominal

Were
simply phenomenal,

And
everyone thought it was me!

A
skeleton once in Khartoum

Asked
a spirit up into his room;

They
spent the whole night

In
the eeriest fight

As
to which should be frightened of whom

There
was a man from Kerala

Who
refused to eat off an ela

When
asked why he wouldn’t

He
replied that he couldn’t

‘Cause
he was a cultured fella

Posted by
Management - Learning from Experiences by Reflection
at
7:13 PM

I wrote, "Blackberry-Picking, is a sensuous description of the act of picking the berries and its transformation in the hands of those who handle it and eat it. Blackberries can become erotic subjects in the hands of a poet such as Heaney."

'Steamy' is generally used of visual scenes that excite the sexual appetite. I don't sense anything like that.